1. Field of Art
The present invention relates generally to a facsimile apparatus, and more particularly to a facsimile-printer combination which is operable selectively in a facimile mode or a printer mode.
2. Related Art Statement
Various types of printing instruments such as ordinary printers and facsimile equipment are widely used for reproducing images on a recording medium according to printing information received from an external output device. Recently, dot-matrix printers capable of printing characters with a matrix of dots are increasingly employed in place of impact printers using a daisy type wheel or the like which has a multiplicity of type fonts or printing elements corresponding to characters. The facsimile machines are designed, at the outset of their development history, as a dot-type image reader-printer combination capable of sending and receiving graphical images in the form of drawings and graphs for example, as well as lines of characters.
Dot-matrix printers and facsimile machines are very similar in nature to each other in that both types of printing equipment are designed to effect printing according to information received from an external output device. However, the dot-matrix printers and the facimile machines are offered and used as two different and separate or independent types of apparatus or equipment. This dichotomy seems to result partly from the fact that the printing pitch of the facimile machine is specified in the metric unit (for instance, eight dots or 3.85 dots are usually used per millimeter), while the printing pitch of the dot-matrix printer is specified in the inch unit. Hence, the printing arrangement used in the facsimile machine cannot be used as an ordinary printer, and the user must invest in the two similar types of equipment. Further, the use of the two machines requires a comparatively large installation space, and different kinds of recording media and print ribbons.